Postcodes in Australia

Australian postcodes have four digits; many envelopes for posting within Australia show this.

Postcodes are used in Australia to sort and send mail to the correct address. All postcodes in Australia have four digits and are placed at the end of the address. Australian postcodes are managed by Australia Post.

Postcodes are published in booklets available from post offices or online from the Australia Post website.

Australian envelopes and postcards often have four square boxes printed in orange at the bottom right for the postcode. These are used when addressing mail by hand.

History[edit]

Use of the Australian Postcode system commenced in 1967, implemented by the Postmaster-General's Department (PMG), now called Australia Post. It replaced earlier postal sorting systems, such as Melbourne's letter and number codes (e.g., N3, E5) and a similar system once used in rural and regional New South Wales.

Format[edit]

Australian Postcodes are four digits, and are written after the name of the city, suburb, or town, and the state or territory:

Mr John Smith

200 Flushcombe Road

BLACKTOWN NSW 2148

When writing an address by hand, a row of four boxes (pre-printed on the lower right hand corner of many envelopes) is usually used.

Geography[edit]

Australian postcodes are sorting information. They are often linked with one area (e.g. 6160 belongs only to Fremantle, Western Australia). But sometimes they can be quite complex, especially in country areas (e.g. 2570 belongs to twenty-two towns and suburbs around Camden, New South Wales). The south-western Victoria 3221 postcode of the Geelong Mail Centre also includes twenty places around Geelong with very few people. This means that mail for these places is not fully sorted until it gets to Geelong. Some postcodes cover large populations (e.g., postcode 4350 serving some 100,000 people in Toowoomba), while other postcodes have much smaller populations, even in urban areas. Australian postcodes range from 0200 (for the Australian National University) to 9944 (Cannonvale, Queensland).

Some towns and suburbs have two postcodes — one for street deliveries and one for post office boxes. For example, a street address in the Sydney suburb of Parramatta would be written like this:

Mr John Smith

99 George Street

PARRAMATTA NSW 2150

But mail sent to a PO Box in Parramatta would be addressed:

Mr John Smith

PO Box 99

PARRAMATTA NSW 2124

Many big businesses, government departments and other institutions receive large volumes of mail. They can have their own postcode as a Large Volume Receiver (LVR), e.g. the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital has the postcode 4029. More postcode ranges were made available for LVRs in the 1990s.

Allocation[edit]

Australia States and territories[edit]

The first one or two numbers usually show the state or territory that the postcode belongs to

Some or all of the postcodes above may cover two states. For example postcode 2620 covers both a locality in NSW (Gundaroo) as well as a locality in the ACT (Hume) - the postcode is within the ACT range.

Jervis Bay Territory, once an exclave of the ACT but now a separate territory, is geographically located on the coast of NSW. It is just south of the towns of Vincentia and Huskisson, with which it shares a postcode. Mail to the Jervis Bay Territory is still addressed to the ACT.

The numbers used to show the state on each radio callsign in Australia are the same number as the first number for postcodes in that state, e.g. 2xx in New South Wales, 3xx in Victoria, etc. Radio callsigns pre-date postcodes in Australia by more than forty years.

External territories[edit]

Australia's external territories are also included in Australia Post's postcode system. While these territories do not belong to any state, they are addressed as such for mail sorting:

State and territory capital cities[edit]

Each state's capital city ends with three zeroes, while territorial capital cities end with two zeroes. Capital city postcodes were the lowest postcodes in their state or territory range, before new ranges for LVRs and PO Boxes were made available. The last number can usually be changed from "0" to "1" to get the postcode for General Post Office boxes in any capital city (though Perth now uses a different range of postcodes for its GPO Boxes):

Allocation within states[edit]

While the first number of a postcode usually shows the state or territory, the second number usually shows a region within the state. However, postcodes with the same second number are not always next to each other. As an example, postcodes in the range 2200—0001 are split between the southern suburbs of Sydney and the Central Coast of New South Wales.

Postcodes with a second number of "0" or "1" are almost always located within the metropolitan area of the state's capital city. Postcodes with higher second numbers are usually located in rural and regional areas. Common exceptions are where towns were rural when postcodes were first introduced in 1967, but have since been suburbanised and incorporated into metropolitan areas, e.g. Penrith, New South Wales has the postcode 2750 and Petrie, Queensland has the postcode 4502.

Within each region with the same second number, postcodes usually get bigger the further one travels from the state's capital city along major highways and railways. For instance, heading north on the North Coast railway in New South Wales away from Sydney:

Major towns and cities[edit]

Major towns and cities tend to have "0" as the last number or last two numbers, e.g. Rockhampton, Queensland has the postcode 4700 and Ballarat, Victoria has the postcode 3350. There are exceptions; the major town of Ipswich, Queensland has the postcode 4305, while Goodna, a relatively unimportant suburb of Ipswich, is allocated 4300.

Postcode squares[edit]

Post Office Preferred envelopes sold in Australia have four boxes in the bottom right corner of the front of the envelope. These boxes or squares, which Australia Post calls postcode squares, have the postcode for hand-addressed mail, for Australia Post's automated mail-sorting equipment, which uses optical character recognition software. Postcode squares were introduced in 1990.[citation needed]

Australia Post says that postcode squares should not be used for machine-addressed mail, or mail going overseas.

Other uses[edit]

Many other organisations now use postcodes. Insurance companies often use postcodes when working out the cost of car and house insurance. The NSW Ministry of Transport uses postcodes to give specific numbers for each bus stop in Greater Sydney. The stop number is five to seven numbers: the first four are the postcode, and the others show the bus stop (sometimes written with a space in between, e.g. "2000 108").

Many companies that produce metropolitan street maps also list the postcodes for each suburb, both in indexes and on the maps themselves. Spatial representation of postcodes is also very popular in defining sales and franchise territories.

Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Taxation Office and many other Federal and State government organisations publish a variety of statistics by postcode which extends the use Australia Post four digit code to many business and social planning related activities.

There is an inherent problem with spatial representation of postcodes since areas referenced to a specific postal code tend to change over time, as new postcodes are added or existing ones are split by Australia Post for operational purposes.[1]

Mechanised sorting[edit]

To improve mechanised sorting, each address now has a sorting number which is printed on the letter as an orange coloured barcode. This number might be 12 numbers long. This system enables the post office to place items in delivery order. Companies can also use Rapid Addressing Tool(RATS) to print what is call Customer Addressed Barcodes that are printed above the address. Every Delivery Point in Australia (DPID) has its own number. The machines that sort mail are Barcode Sorter(BCS)sorts and sequences letters up to C5 size. MARS sequences letters up to C5 articles. Flat multi level ocr (FMOCR) Reads inprints and sorts C5 to A3 size articles.